I just Beat The GMAT!

On June 9th I took the GMAT for the 2nd time and am excited to say I increased my score from a 660 to a 710! I performed poorly on the verbal my first time around and knew I could do better so I scheduled my second appointment as soon as GMAC would let me. You can read the post from my first go here:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/gmat-verbal- ... 82580.html

The month between the two test's I made it my goal to hit verbal hard and try to just maintain my math ability so that I could score the same as last time or improve by a point or two. I used the following resources to work on my verbal.

RC99-great resource but can be demoralizing, also a lot of typos. If you're into practicing the toughest material out there, this is it. Some answers must be taken with a grain of salt. I found one passage that is identical to one I had on a Kaplan practice test but the answer to one of the questions is different.

Aristotle CR and SC-CR is based on LSAT questions that are similar to GMAT format. Not as difficult as I was hoping. I never could find a resource that specialized in really difficult CR. SC was average.

BTG Questions: Amazing for quant. Make sure to do all problems that are 600 level and higher. Verbal questions were good but difficulty classification seemed obscure. Some of the easyist questions were considered difficult and the ones considered easy were really tough. Do all of the verbal problems.

Kaplan: Bought a Kaplan book to get access to practice tests. Although the indivdual quant and verbal scores are scaled in a ridiculous manner (quant and verbal scores in the high 50's that equal an overall low 700's score) the overall scoring seemed decent. The verbal was also challenging which I liked. Here are the practice CAT test scores I did between the tests:

Kaplan 2: 750 (51Q 49V)
Kaplan 3: 760 (49Q 53V) see what I mean about crazy scaled scores?
Kaplan 4: 730 (47Q 51V)

Hindsight:
I think my experience shows that it is possible to make a significant improvement in your score in a short time. Prior to my second test I had heard about people advertising big jumps, but they were using practice CAT scores and comparing them to their real GMAT scores which means nothing to me. My initial Knewton diagnostic CAT way back in September was a 510. With this said, don't give up if you feel like you are better than your GMAT score. Study hard and retake it!

As far a practice tests go, in my opinion, MGMAT is by far the best quant test. Their verbal has good questions but the algorithm is way to generous. I think Knewton may have the best verbal assessment in their tests. Obviously, nothing beats GMATPrep. Find the resources which has all of the their questions compiled. Final note, if you plan on scoring well on the real test, in my opinion it is more important to be rock solid with the easy/med difficulty questions than be good at the difficult ones. Mastering the easy/med ones can (almost must) be done by going through the official guides and taking a prep class. Knewton's was great. In addition, I bought all of the MGMAT books and found them to be very helpful. After that, you can dive into the tough problems.

Apologies for the lengthy post, but I think a lot of folks out there find it tough to find confidence that they can improve their score a second time around. It can be done!

Don worry. The post aint that lengthy.

It is a good score and very good balance too. Congrats!

All d best for your next steps.

Congrats on your wonderful score. Awesome improvement. It is very inspiring to hear stories of people who make their way up the score. All the best with your application process.

thats a serious improvement in a month,
Kudos ! !

dont u think the RC-99 becomes counter productive after passage 70 ? I agree that it leads to improvement because of the convoluted passages. However, I stopped after passage 70 as I would better understand french/latin than the English in there.
Along with this, some questions are dubious.

Did u use entire aristotle LSAT 100 cr set ? how was it ?

bblast wrote:thats a serious improvement in a month,
Kudos ! !

dont u think the RC-99 becomes counter productive after passage 70 ? I agree that it leads to improvement because of the convoluted passages. However, I stopped after passage 70 as I would better understand french/latin than the English in there.
Along with this, some questions are dubious.

Did u use entire aristotle LSAT 100 cr set ? how was it ?

Yes I think that the 'hard' passages in RC99 are a little over the top. Their extreme length combined with the sometimes debatable answers and difficult content make them harder than anything you'll see on the test and just seem to shatter confidence. But for the most part I found RC99 good for practicg active reading, and digesting long passages in a short amount of time.

I did the aristotle CR that was free to download from their site. From all the hype I heard about LSAT CR questions, they didn't seem that different or more difficult than others. I'd do the BTG questions instead.

Hi Modo,

I gave my 3rd attempt on 9th June, but unfortunately got 620 (Q49, v27), although I got 640 (q48, v30) in my previous attempt in aug, 2010 where I messed up my verbal timing and had to randomly guess on last 5 questions ( so I would have scored around 670-680 easily).

This time I was pretty confident on scoring in mid 700's. In all my practice tests I got 700+
MGMAT 4a 700
MGMAT 5a 730
MGMAT 6a 730
MGMAT 1b 730
GMATprep 700
GMATPrep2 750
etc

I was getting 90% correct in CR. SC was also getting better day by day. It looked like I even improved on RC. Infact during last 3-4 days I did not study much,I just did 1 section each to be in practice. Even on test day I was confident. AWA went of well. Maths was fine. I got couple of v tough questions that I had never seen before. I tried to solve some and made some intelligent guess on others. I was happy to see tough questions which indicates that my performance was good.
Verbal looked easy and tough intermittently. I thought I was doing well but couldn't believe the score when I saw 620.

Prep materials used
MGMAT SC
MGMAT RC
CR powerscore Bible
Official GMAT review 12th ed
Official verbal review 2nd ed
GMAT prep
MGMAT tests
Aristotle SC

I want to give it again in July. Can you please recommend me form where to study, what helped you and anything you would like to recommend. I don't want to repeat questions from previous books/practice tests as I believe that I may remember some passages/questions.

My biggest problem now is how to identify if I am prepared for the test. For this preparation (June, 2011) I was scoring well on practice tests and was confident and I screwed up. Now what tests/questions I can take and gauge my test preparation.

I'd give Kaplan or Knewton a shot. Both of their verbal sections are pretty tough and are scored fairly accurately as far as percentiles go (disregard the Kaplan raw score). I think the most difficult portion on the real test was SC. None of the questions seem to be obvious and take up time. The only way to get better is to go through each question and say to yourself why every answer choice is right or wrong. When in doubt, look for meaning and parallelism. In addition, use error logs (especially with idioms) so you aren't making the same mistakes over and over again. As I mentioned earlier, RC99 is good way to get better at reading tough passages. In the end getting better means being faster, allowing more time to deal with the tougher problems. Good luck!

Congrats! That's a wonderful improvement in a short period of time. Did you practice the passages in the official Guide and how difficult do you think they were vis-a-vis those you got on the actual exam ?

That's inspiring! Congrats!

powerpuff wrote:Congrats! That's a wonderful improvement in a short period of time. Did you practice the passages in the official Guide and how difficult do you think they were vis-a-vis those you got on the actual exam ?

The OG passages I thought were somewhere in the easy-middle difficulty similar to the rest of the material in the OG. I could tell I was doing a little better this time versus last time because my last passage was very difficult. More like a RC99 passage than a OG passage.

How did you improve your accuracy in SC? I have my test on Aug 26th. My SC accuracy is around 50%. RC and CR around 70% to 80%. I am able to narrow down to the last two choices. However I am unable to pick the right answer? Any advice to improve SC is greatly appreciated.

congrats! do you think the difficulty level of SC on the real test is greater than that of OG (the last 10-15 questions) ?

modo wrote:

powerpuff wrote:Congrats! That's a wonderful improvement in a short period of time. Did you practice the passages in the official Guide and how difficult do you think they were vis-a-vis those you got on the actual exam ?

The OG passages I thought were somewhere in the easy-middle difficulty similar to the rest of the material in the OG. I could tell I was doing a little better this time versus last time because my last passage was very difficult. More like a RC99 passage than a OG passage.

Thanks for the reply. Also wanted to ask whether you used OG11 or OG10 also ?

powerpuff wrote: Thanks for the reply. Also wanted to ask whether you used OG11 or OG10 also ?

As far as I know, a lot of questions in OG12 and OG11 overlap. Here's a document showing the unique questions in OG12 and OG11. So I don't think that it'd be wise to buy OG11 if you already have OG12.

@Black Knight
Thanks for the file though I already had it.
I know that a lot of questions in OG12 and OG11 overlap but just to be on the safer side, I wanted opinion of people who have already cracked the exam